Jacob Appelbaum wrote: > Just as a side note - SMS is just slightly better than GCM. There are > nearly no good Free Software options that only uses open protocols > over open and free networks.
I hope I'm not derailing this too much---but I would like to call attention to the big practical difference in the _identity_ model of these networks, as I made a similar complaint on the TextSecure list. The PSTN is maybe not as open a network as the Internet, but there is still a lot of /de facto/ multi-provider interoperability, some regulation over how this is handled (at least in the US), and a broad social expectation that people can generally acquire telephone numbers and that it's hard for any single provider to just declare that you don't exist. AFAIK, WhatsApp and the new TextSecure (and iMessage, and Telegram, and so forth) are all centralized-identity networks: if the master computer says you don't have a name/number, you don't have one and you can't talk to anyone. So if there's ever a "since this was the only measure we could afford to develop in time to stem a recent tide of weird TextSecure spam, all recently registered users 'temporarily' have to link their Google account" or such... So I sympathize somewhat with the ideas of SMS being finicky, technologically problematic, not really that open, hard to make easy to use, leaking a lot of metadata, etc., but that doesn't remove the scarier problems with the "obvious" alternatives. Using SMS as a fallback "authoritative" channel to bootstrap other channels can be a nice approach so long as the fallback stays in place. > All the best, > Jacob ---> Drake Wilson _______________________________________________ List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/guardian-dev To unsubscribe, email: [email protected]
